dominion for the aristocracy. The increase of celibacy was rendering
sterile the most celebrated stocks; the most lamentable vices and
disorders became tolerated and common in the most illustrious families,
and ruinous habits of extravagance spread generally among that
aristocracy, once so simple and austere. All this had grown up after
the conquest of Egypt, which had established more points of contact
with the East; and it increased in proportion as those industries and
the commerce in articles of luxury which had flourished at Alexandria
under the Ptolemies were gradually transplanted to Rome, where the
merchants hoped to establish among their conquerors the clientele which
had been lost with the fall of the Kingdom of the Nile. The ladies
especially took up with the new oriental customs, and, preferring
expensive stuffs and jewels, turned from the loom, which Livia had
wished to preserve as the emblem of womanhood. Many young men of the
great families were beginning to show a distaste for the army, for the
government of the state, for jurisprudence, for all those activities
which had been the jealous privilege of the nobility of the past. One
gave himself up to literary pursuits, another cultivated philosophy,
another busied himself only with the increase of his inherited fortune,
while another lived only in pleasure and idleness. So it happened that
there began to appear descendants of great houses who refused to be
senators; every year an effort had to be made to find a sufficient
number of candidates for the more numerous positions like the
questorship, and in the army it was no easy matter to fill all the
posts of the superior officers which were reserved for members of the
nobility.

[Illustration: The Emperor Augustus. This statue was found in 1910 in
the Via Labicana, not far from the Colosseum.]